Life, love, aging, death ... and the sadness and the pain

No matter what one thinks of Ronald Reagan’s politics and his performance as President, which can be debated along partisan lines, or what one thinks of Nancy Reagan, who also inspires diverse feelings, the Reagans should be admired for the relationship they had with each other.

Their marriage was a true public love story. What they achieved is difficult to obtain. There are marriages where love flickers, at most, and then there are marriages where love is very evident. But it’s rare to find a marriage where love is so central to the relationship as it was to the Reagans.

The death of our 40th President got me thinking about love, life, aging and death. Love, to me, is so essential to our being that it blots out everything else. Without it, darkness sets in pretty quickly and we can become lost souls.

On the other side of the issue is what happens when somebody you love beyond compare dies. The sadness can be overwhelming, the will to live disappears, the heart is literally crushed.

I’ve been there, with the death of my mother and Junior, our granddaughter. The pain is immense, and prolonged. And it never leaves. It’s always there, like a small sliver under the fingernail. You move on, because to survive you have to, but it’s never the same again.

I have more success now keeping the sadness in check than I used to, but once in a while something will open the floodgates --- like listening to the music of Iris DeMent the other day --- and it rushes in again.

DeMent singing “After You Are Gone” got to me and some of my life flashed before me more than I would have liked, and the tears came slowly behind like a light mist on a gray day.

“I’ll miss you, oh how I’ll miss you. I’ll dream of you and I’ll cry a million tears,” DeMent sang in her haunting voice and I thought of my mother and Junior and wished that I could have gone back and changed things, made things whole again.

But .....

I worked on a farm when I was real young and my mother vowed that if I got hurt I would never work there again. One day it happened. A farm hand threw an empty gas can over the side and into the bed of a truck where I was standing. It hit me on the head, causing a nasty gash. Every time my heart pumped, blood spurted like Yellowstone’s Old Faithful.

The farm hands rushed me back to the farm where the owner patched me up and sent me home. I waited until it was dark before entering the house, fearful my mother would see the wound and ban me from the farm.

As it turned out, my mother was visiting the next door neighbor and when talk got around to the farm, she reiterated her vow about me getting hurt. The top farm hand happened to be there and he blurted out, “Oh, he didn’t get hurt too bad.”

So my mother was waiting for me when I tried to sneak into the back door. I no sooner got into the door and there she was at the top of the steps going into the kitchen.

“Let me see your head!,” I remember her saying.

She died two years later when I was 12 and I can’t tell you how many times since I have wished through the sadness and pain that I would see her there again as I walk in the door.

It doesn’t seem possible that was over 50 years ago. I still remember walking my high school halls, playing basketball in the gym, still see the faces, hear the noise, sense the smell. How can that be so long ago?

DeMent again, singing, “ ... the sun’s settin’ fast, and just like they say, nothing good ever lasts. Go on now and kiss it goodbye.”

I don’t think I can kiss it goodbye ... as that young kid, walking the mile to The Colonial, drinking a cherry coke that cost a dime, taking the slow way back, walking the well-worn train tracks, bending down to snatch up another stone to throw as far as the crow flies, sitting quietly on the rails to listen to the sounds of the wild before heading across the fields ... back home to mama before she dies.

So long ago. Yet it seems like yesterday.

Two of my brothers called me on my birthday. Both are still humming along. It’s a Mosher trait to work long and often and they both do that .... although there is a difference now. Age is showing its face.

Ray will be 74 in October and just recently spent some time in the hospital. He is my idol. My hero. He is the one who when I started out in organized baseball as a young boy came back from boot camp with a brand new glove for me to use at shortstop. He is the one who let me tag along on the farm, pulling me up on the tractor while he plowed the fields, did the haying.

He is the one who as a high-school slugger put a baseball over the church steeple over in right-centerfield. He is the one who taught me how to throw a football, and let me ride in the car with him as he spun the car in circles in the icy snow, if I would promise not to tell dad (I didn’t).

The hospital stay took something out of him, though. His eight-hour days in the woods gathering 80 cords with his buddy Buzz may be a thing of the past. They are more like five hours now because he gets pretty tired. So one of his boys recently came in from another state to spend a week with him in the woods to help out.

It’s shocking to me to hear him talk about being tired. Being tired was never an excuse not to do something.

“And ya know the sun’s settin’ fast ... ”. DeMent goes on.

Brother Ronnie turned 70 in February. He’s the most competitive person I have ever met, and I met a lot of very competitive people in my long career as a sportswriter. His nieces and nephews still tell stories about “Uncle Ronnie” never letting them beat him at anything. I know I have never beaten him at anything, and I wasn’t any slacker.

Ronnie has retired several times from coaching, but I now think he really means it. But he has slowed down some.

When he called he just had finished 18 holes of golf and was headed to his lake cottage to flip burgers for his church’s annual gathering there. And he still paints on the side, doing work mostly for farmers scattered among the dairy farms near where he lives. But age is showing its face. He admits that he finds himself not having enough energy to do eight hours unless he does the work at a slower pace.

“Like the flowers I’m fading ...”

My life has had a lot of ups and downs to it. I don’t know how I survived some of the downs, especially early in my life when I pushed the envelope enough times to fill a large post office.

There have been the tragedies, the pain and sadness, but there has been a lot of love, too. But I just wonder where all the time in my life went.

Ronnie’s got it figured out he has 10 years left. He reads the obits in the newspaper and says when the people in it are consistently dying at a younger age then he is, which he says will probably be another two years, he’s going to stop reading the obits.

I’m a little selfish in the dying part because I want to go first. Because if Mary goes first, there won’t be floodgates big enough to hold back the sadness, the pain.

As Nancy Reagan certainly knows by now.

You are loved.